Kids See Ghosts

Kid Cudi and Kanye West

Release Date: June 8th 2018

Before you jump to any conclusions about this album, you have to understand one of the central themes of the album, which is how Kanye and Cudi were able to overcome their past struggles. For Kanye, his struggle was having an addiction to opiates. For Cudi, his struggle was abusing drugs as a way to deal with his depression. What is interesting is how in the song "Cudi Montage" the hook is "Hmm-mm-mm, woah, woah, Save me, Lord". So both of them now rely on God as their savior from pain, instead of the various drugs they were both involved in. This isn't going to be an album full of Kanye's hard self that he's portrayed as. This is what Kanye's life was like when he basically disappeared for 2 years. The reason this album is getting such negative reviews is that no one wants to hear about struggles that Kanye dealt with; they want the fast cars, beautiful women, and millions of dollars.

Kid Cudi and Kanye West just released their first debut album together: "Kids See Ghosts". I have listened to the album countless times since it's release and I am very very impressed by the work that these two hip-hop icons came together and produced. I have seen a lot of posts stating how disappointed people were about the album and how they thought it would be so much better. The truth is you have to let the words speak to you and it takes time. Very rarely do artists get very positive reviews after the first time listening. Recently, Kanye has managed to work his way back to the top of the hip-hop game with his newest album "ye". But who you haven't heard from in a while is Kid Cudi, who last released an album in 2016. But together these two artists are able to continue to make great music; Kid Cudi's flow and style is the same, and he continues to give the people what they want by telling them it will be okay, and you will make it through anything. The sound from Kanye is something I have never heard before because he is able to copy Cudi's flow and style, so they end up coming together to spread one common message: there's no struggle too big to overcome.

Artwork:

The artist who designed the album cover is Takashi Murakami, who previously worked with Kanye back in 2007 on the cover art for Kanye's album "Graduation," as well as creating the animations for the "Good Morning" music video back in 2009. After reading countless interviews with Takashi about the meaning of the cover art, it is easy to conclude that there isn't one specific meaning. One thing I did find out is the two small inverted Kanji characters translate to "chaos," but the rest is up to your own interpretation.